The Dish

Tie it to bonuses.

Steve Brodner sketches the former Atlantic wunderkind:

Ross Douthat, the new conservative voice on the Times op-ed page, [is] profiled here in Mother Jones. He wrote a scathing piece on Avatar last week. Funny to see a condemnation of the expression of cultural notions through sci-fi by a Lord of the Rings nut. Also loves the Church and Chesterton. Interesting character.

It appears that the Vatican's incessant hostility to gays has been having an impact on some at the Catholic college. The student-run newspaper just ran a cartoon with this as its joke:

“What’s the easiest way to turn a fruit into a vegetable?"

“No idea.”

“A baseball bat.”

The editor has apologized.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger criticize the focus of Obama's climate change policies:

In the end, whether or not the Senate passes a cap-in-name-only climate bill, the long-term failure of Kyoto and all other efforts to establish binding emissions caps is virtually assured and is a function of a basic technological problem. We simply do not have low-carbon technologies today that can at large scale replace fossil fuels at a cost that any political economy in the world is willing to impose upon itself. There will be no political solution to climate change, no binding international agreement to substantially reduce emissions, and no effective domestic carbon cap until low-carbon technologies are much cheaper than they are today.

A reader writes:

A few independent posts on your blog today highlight an interesting comparison–Brown’s support of torture vs. Coakley being “far to the right” of Kennedy on criminal justice.

Let me suggest that if you view torture as an unacceptable human rights violation, you should be mortified by Coakley.  The blurb you excerpt from Radley Balko’s piece didn’t address the most troubling case from Coakley’s career—the Amirault case.  Any prosecutor that would continue to press the Amirault case in light of what was known when Coakley took it over is a bigger threat to human rights than Scott Brown.  And I would seriously question the commitment to human rights of anyone who didn’t feel the same way.

If you’re wondering how Coakley truly feels about the rights of terror suspects from across the globe, you might want to look at how she felt about the rights of the accused when it came to people living in her own county.

A study.

In California and Washington State, full legalization is now looking more and more likely:

The Washington state legislature will hold a preliminary vote Wednesday on whether to sell pot in state liquor stores, though even its authors say the bill is unlikely to pass. The same day in California, backers of a well-funded ballot measure to legalize marijuana are expected to file more than enough signatures to put the initiative before state voters in November.

Activists have also been busy in Washington state, with one group filing a marijuana-legalization initiative last Monday to put the issue on the November ballot. Activists in Oregon, meanwhile, say they have collected more than half of the signatures they need by July to allow a vote on whether the state should set up a system of medical-marijuana dispensaries.

It's coming in the nation's capital as well. And the polls are shifting swiftly in favor.

David Dalrymple finds that "filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill" in the digital age:

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.

E.D. Kain calls me "reflexively anti-Republican":

I have trouble understanding where Sullivan is coming from with a post like this one, criticizing Scott Brown’s apparently “mindless op-ed” by cherry-picking everything he can find that casts Brown in a poor light.  Certainly some of Brown’s points in his op-ed are little more than standard GOP boilerplate.  But the thing about boilerplate is that it accurately represents the views of a very large group of people.  Cutting taxes is not in and of itself wrong-headed, however unsurprising the idea may be.  Certainly it’s not as wrong-headed as raising taxes would be right now before a significant economic recovery, and with unemployment in the double digits.

But the absence of any proposals for spending cuts, which one assumes is a Republican concern, renders this point moot. The minute a Republican actually proposes a set of policies that would return us to fiscal balance through spending cuts alone, I'll listen. But none of them is honest enough to offer such a thing. To quote an anecdote from Peggy Noonan's column a week ago:

I spoke a few weeks ago with a respected Republican congressman who told me with some excitement of a bill he's put forward to address the growth of entitlements and long-term government spending. We only have three or four years to get it right, he said. He made a strong case. I asked if his party was doing anything to get behind the bill, and he got the blanched look people get when they're trying to keep their faces from betraying anything. Not really, he said. Then he shrugged. "They're waiting for the Democrats to destroy themselves."

I'm not reflexively anti-Republican. I have learned through bitter experience to oppose this kind of Bush Republican.